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Friday, August 03, 2007

Another week draws to a close. A week filled not with the grand crash of great events or the flame and death of war so much as with a purposeless drift toward entropy.

Partisanship in the US Congress has reached a new low as Democrats violated their own regulations to hijack a vote on illegal immigrants. An increasingly clueless Condoleeza Rice and Livni are leading Israel and America to disaster in the War on Terror in their latest round of negotiations. In other words Ein Chadash Tahat Hasemesh is the watchword.

Meanwhile I've learned that Noah Feldman, the target of a previous article on this blog majored in Islamic Thought in college and volunteered 75,000 dollars worth of his services as a lawyer to resist the placement of an Eruv in Tenafly, New Jersey.

This makes his article unsurprising except it is no longer the vicious scrawlings of a rejected member of an Orthodox Jewish community but someone who actively hates Jews, religious and otherwise and seeks to do them harm. I think we've spent enough time taking his ramblings seriously and wondering how we can soothe his wounded feelings.

The separation of Gaza and the West Bank provides the greatest opportunity since 1967 to resolve the status of the West Bank and Jerusalem . Policy-makers have been wedded to the vision of a two state concept and have not entertained alternative solutions.

Without a solution, Oslo adopted a two-state framework that left unresolved borders, limited defense rights and a “chutes and ladders” division of Jerusalem that has left chaos on the ground where Jewish and Arab populations live intertwined with the other.

West Bank Arabs have been voting with their feet for Israel , as they flee life under the PA. Israeli ID cards have become the most sought after commodity in the West Bank today, especially in the Jerusalem area.

The ability to attract the constituency of a rival is a political victory of the highest order. With Israel able to bypass external players, negotiation occurs at the individual, family or local level.

How Israel handles its political attractiveness will determine if it can use the opportunity to resolve the conflict.

Wrapping up the Feldman week, over at Daled Amos, the OU hits back at the New York Times and Noah Feldman

Today, the “Orthodox Union” – the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization – called upon the New York Times to apologize for its publication in its Sunday Magazine of an essay authored by Mr. Noah Feldman after the New York Jewish Week revealed yesterday that Feldman and Times editors knew in advance of publication that the essay contained false statements. The Union further called upon the Times to remove Feldman from his position as a Contributing Editor to the NY Times Magazine.

The essay, a highly personal account of Feldman’s difficult relationship with the Modern Orthodox Jewish community in which he was raised, entitled “Orthodox Paradox,” was published in the July 22 edition of the Times’ Magazine. The essay opens with a lengthy account of Feldman attending a reunion of his Orthodox high-school with his non-Jewish finacee, and his assertion that the school deliberately and singularly eliminated Feldman and his finacee from the photograph of the reunion published in the school newsletter. The NY Jewish Week, in its August 3 edition, published a report in which Feldman admits having learned in advance of the publication of his essay that his assertion of being intentionally edited out of the photo was false. Moreover, the Jewish Week expose reveals that NYTimes editors were also aware, in advance of publication, that the essay’s assertion was false.

This was foreshadowed really when Noah Feldman propped up his claim about being edited out by relying on a statement from another student and worded so vaguely as to dodge the fact that he was making a false statement by implication.

The New York Times proved itself a party to printing false statements and slandering a religion. It's time to make good.